A Verifiable Multi-Authority Secret Election Allowing Abstention from Voting

In this paper, we propose a robust and verifiable multi-authority secret voting scheme which meets the requirements of large-scale general elections. This scheme uses a uniquely blind threshold signature scheme to get blind threshold electronic votes such that any voter can abstain from voting after the registration phase. It also uses the threshold cryptosystem to guarantee fairness among the candidates’ campaigns and to provide a mechanism for ensuring that any voter can make an open objection to the tally if his vote has not been published. In this scheme, the computations among voters are independent and voters only have to send an anonymous message to the counter after the registration phase. This scheme preserves the privacy of a voter from the counter, administrators, scrutineers and other voters. Completeness, robustness and verifiability of the voting process are ensured and hence no one can produce a false tally or corrupt or disrupt the election.